


Afterlife

by captainodonewithyou



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, static quake - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-06
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-05 08:55:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5369336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainodonewithyou/pseuds/captainodonewithyou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Daisy feels about Lincoln. Someone challenged me to write them something to make them ship Static Quake.  I paired that with a request to write a canon compliant Static Quake fic from season 2-now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He looks at her differently than she has ever been looked at before. 

She doesn’t notice it, not immediately--because she is caught up noticing other things; things like the twinge of the needles the Afterlife doctor’s have stuck in her skin, and the couple of doors through which she might be able to make a getaway, and the way the churning pressure beneath her skin has eased back for the first time to a dull, quiet, throb.  She is noticing how it feels to actually be able to feel her joints, to feel her fingertips, to feel the impulses coming from outside her skin again. 

The bed she is in is soft.

His eyes are blue.

When she meets his gaze, she notices how bright he is, how open.  She notices how he is scanning her expression minutely, notices how when blue catches brown he shifts his attentions shyly elsewhere, notices how his tongue trips over a retort to Gordon and notices how his nose wrinkles just a bit when he realizes the clumsiness of his words. His eyes flick to her again, reading her response--and when he sees she is still watching him, he looks swiftly back at the screen displaying her vitals.

He is in a shadow, but she thinks that the tips of his ears burn pink.

//

When he talks about her powers, he doesn’t use the voice she has become accustomed to.  The scientific, detached musings that separate _her_ and the _thing inside her_ and the _people around her_ and make her small, make her a victim--make her weak.

He talks about her powers gently.  He talks about them like she is a cause and they are an effect and like if what she touches crumbles, it is its own fault for stepping in her way.  She can’t remember the last time that someone made her feel _normal_.  The last time she felt a part of something, but not a burden--belonging but not holding back.  When he talks about what he coins _her gift_ , she somehow feels like she is herself again.

She has been on the opposite end of pity time and time too many, and he talks to her like an equal. 

When he shows her that he _is_ just like her, her fingers tingle and her heart pounds and she isn’t certain that it is all a result of the static that his powers send pulsing through her veins. 

His smile is brighter than his eyes and this time when their gazes meet, he doesn’t tear away.

There is honesty in his eyes, supplemented by his stuttering incapability to lie, and she doesn’t realize how unsafe she has felt up until this moment.

//

He looks at her like she is mightier than the mountains Jiaying helps her crumble but he doesn’t let that make her into something too strong for careful attentions.  He makes sure she eats, he makes sure she has company--he cracks awful jokes when even she doesn’t realize her spirits are low.  She isn’t sure who to trust anymore, not really--but she knows without doubt that his eyes are always watching her back.  

She is a force of nature but she is only human, and he has a way of reminding her by just being at her side that she can be fierce and vulnerable all at once.  She knows he has other responsibilities, other jobs to tend to in the little city where she is beginning to feel at home--but his priority is being at her side, listening to the stories she tells him about her past and opening up with his own. 

He is a guiding force but he lets her lead, following cautiously in the steps she takes. 

His company is easy and fun, and the more she opens up to him the more he opens up to her, and the hours she spends missing her friends slowly fill up with the making of memories with a new one.

She thinks he is absolutely _crazy_.  He is studying to be a doctor, he helps in the Afterlife when they need him.  In his free time.

(”Because med students have _so_ much free time.”

“Careful, Skye. I can and I will go get one of my textbooks and make this a real party.”

“God, please don’t.”)

He asks about the scars on her stomach and when she tells him she got shot, she thinks he thinks she is just as crazy as she sees him.

She is in awe of him regardless.  He looks at her like he might think she makes the world turn. 

//

The world is shaking around them but when he drags her to safety and her fall is broken by his body, for the briefest moment the space between them seems to be frozen in time.

(Her heart had pounded hard against her chest when he appeared, when Cal threw him hard and blood oozed from the wound on his forehead.  It was natural for her to move to him, to protect him--grabbing at his arm and placing herself firmly between her friend and her father.

It seemed just as impulsive when he stepped in front of her path for the first time since she has known him, putting himself between her stubborn movements and the threat.)

Intuitively she knows that she has to move, has to run while there is still a chance.  He believes in her, believes in her abilities--but he is honest, and she has in no way honed her powers enough to use them safely.

But all of her senses are suddenly on him in a way they have never been before--noticing the pleading behind the blue of his eyes, the solidness of his warm body between hers, the tingle building beneath her skin that she isn’t sure whether to attribute to his powers or something else entirely.

She feels herself hover impulsively closer to him for the briefest of moments before a yell from the hall beside her tugs them both sharply back to their senses and he pleads again for her to hurry.

She is too dazed to make her tongue form the “be careful,” that pounds in her skull.

//

She tells herself she has to save him because he was taken protecting her.  That she owes him for putting his her life before his, in the Afterlife and beyond.

She is back at S.H.I.E.L.D. and she is relieved to be back with her friends but she misses the Afterlife.  Misses the feeling of belonging and of _home_. 

He is her friend, too.

The first thing she notices is his hair, stuck up and staticky.

It should be her unconscious and bloody in the makeshift hospital bed--and she is caught up in the emotion, caught up unsure of her next move--and it isn’t until the uneven beeping of his heart monitor goes still that she is forced into movement, forced into doing _anything_.

The room isn’t made for keeping it’s patients alive, and she can’t find anything Simmons might instruct her to use, nothing that could make a heart beat again.  She is growing frantic, thinking of the last time she saw him and how the pulse of his electricity speeds the pounding of her heart.

It is a gamble, possibly even a dangerous one--but a gamble is all she has left. 

She focuses on him, listens hard for his usually imposingly loud aura.  She finds it in a faint buzz over his chest and tugs at the molecules, letting the warm tingle fill her veins and build up before shooting it all back over his heart.

His monitor starts beeping again, and the warm pulse of static is replaced by cool, racing relief as she sinks weakly against him, listening as his usual buzzing fills in the quiet cracks of the room.

She refuses to leave his side again, even though she knows her friends are whispering about it behind her back.  He stayed with her in the Afterlife, protected her at her weakest.

She owes him the same. 

She can’t imagine losing him again.

He comes back to her in a flicker of lights and a flutter of eyelids, and it is her turn to crack jokes and lighten the heavy atmosphere around them--and the weight on her chest lifts when his bright smile returns to his lips, even if just for a moment.

//

And then things go wrong. 

 

He leaves before she can catch him, before she can even thank him for believing her. For having her back, still, after _everything_.

 

She _tries_ to let him go.

 

//

 

The first time she tracks him down to ask for his help, she thinks it will be easy.  It is Lincoln, after all–Lincoln who seems to think his existence rides entirely on the people he helps.  Helping the others like her, like them—it isn’t something she thinks she’ll have to pitch to him.

 

She finds him between classes at his university—it isn’t hard—and tells him she needs help, that if he still wants to be that helping hand over the damn crater that is transitioning–there is a place on her team for him.  It is only after she extends the invitation, only after an odd sort of silence intrudes that she notices how dark the circles around his eyes are and how low his shoulders have slumped, and how this _isn’t_ the guy who assured her the thing inside of her that makes the world sing around her is a gift. 

 

She is surprised anyway, when his voice bites on a cool edge and he asks how she found him.

 

(She knows it is a blatant hint but she refuses to take it until he tells her he _isn’t_ interested, that he didn’t just cut ties with a manipulative organization to turn around and join a new one, that he isn’t interested in further weaponizing the powers of the people like them.  She watches him walk away until he disappears into a building. He only looks back once).

 

//

 

She tries again closer to his graduation, because there is a part of her that refuses to believe that this is him now. That he has changed into whatever he is.

 

Because she _misses_ him.

 

He is stressed and she is growing frantic, and they yell a little—shaking the thin walls of his apartment.  She tells him that this isn’t who he is, this isn’t what he is…and it isn’t something he particularly wants to hear. 

 

Mostly, she is growing concerned for him. Dirty dishes are piled in his sink and clothes are unfolded everywhere and when she confronts it, he tells her he is busy and she isn’t helping matters, but there is a closed defeat in his eyes that speaks to everything but.  He tells her that he is _happy_ in his new life, that this is where he really wants to be and that he wants her to leave him alone–but happy comes with connotations like smiles and light that she sees none of in his life. 

 

And he is a terrible liar.

 

//

 

She knows he won’t help her after the second time she asks, but she keeps coming around anyway.  She wants him to know he is wanted, that he has a _place_ –and she tries to find her own words to combat the new words he attaches to what he once called their Gifts, but it is harder and harder when each passes his lips and comes as a punch to her own gut. 

 

She knows he is wrong–he is who _showed_ her that he is wrong.  But he is who is supposed to do the convincing and she is who is supposed to do the fighting and she is at the disadvantage from the start.  The piles of dishes grow in his sink and the blinds are always drawn and one day, he isn’t there anymore at all.

 

She finds where he is serving his residency, one of the smaller hospitals in a 30-mile-radius of the dark old apartment.  He is helping people again, and she tells herself that it is enough, that she no longer has to be the distraction–that he has a purpose and people and responsibilities. She tries to leave him alone, even though it makes her feel sick to her stomach.

 

Joey reminds her of how she felt when she came to the Afterlife, but her jokes don’t make him laugh.  Mack thinks Lincoln is a lost cause and really, so does she.

 

She needs to see him anyway.

 

He is more resigned this time, when he pulls back the curtain to find her waiting on the bed—there is no flicker of recognition in his eyes, so much darker than the light, playful blue she remembers from the Afterlife. From that feeling of home.

 

She tries to tell herself it doesn’t sting.

 

He has to flee and she swallows hard when Mack catches her arm and doesn’t let her follow behind him. It is the second time she has snatched his normal right out from under him.

 

She doesn’t intend to do it again.

 

//

 

He reaches out to her and she isn’t delusional, she knows it is because she is all he has left—but it is a start. It is a crack in the mile-high walls he has slammed around himself.

 

He is different than she has ever seen him before, all nervous pacing and slumped shoulders and eyes dark and pleading and guarded.

 

She doesn’t think she can take letting him slip through her fingers again, not with the way her heart gives at the state she is in. It is ridiculous but she feels responsible, in part—feels like she has failed to protect him in the way he has protected her.

 

It isn’t her fault and it isn’t his fault.

 

The world is shaking but they are frozen in another moment.

 

She shouldn’t do it but she _has to_. Words are his specialty and he isn’t hearing what she tells him, isn’t listening to her for the first time that she can remember. He wants her help but he struggles against it, too closed off to let anything she says in.

 

She shouldn’t but she can’t _help it_.

 

Kissing him feels like home.

 

But then he is gone again.

 

//

 

The first time he calls, she almost doesn’t believe it is him. She has thought about calling him, reaching out herself—but she can only see how badly it could end, like every other time she has tried to contact him. To bring him back to her.

 

She holds her tongue because she has only imagined scenarios in which he hears her hesitant voice and quickly hangs up.

 

There is a pleading longing in his voice when he says her name again, and she swallows hard—squeezing her eyes shut before affirming it is indeed her with a murmured reply.

 

“Lincoln.”

 

It takes a moment for common sense to kick in, to remind her that the ATCU is still after him, that there are still monsters on his heels—and she calculates quickly the longest she can keep him on the line without putting him in danger.

 

It isn’t long enough.

 

He asks her if she is alright and she isn’t sure if the pressure of the words make her want to laugh or cry.

 

(“You’re an _idiot_.”

 

“Don’t act _too_ happy to hear from me.”)

 

She tells him he will remain an idiot until he tells her where he is, but she follows the threat up with a crumbling reminder that there are only 15 seconds until the call is traceable—he can’t take the words too seriously.

 

He calls her again the next day anyway.

 

//

 

He is more or less in one piece when they pick him and Mack up on the jet, and it takes every ounce of her poor self-control to keep her greeting to a soft, relieved smile from across the plane. There are too many people around who can’t be trusted and there are more important things to worry about, people in danger and allegiances up in the air.

 

She doesn’t realize exactly the extent of the self-destructive streak he is on until he practically offers himself up to Andrew—he knows as well as she does that his powers are useless against him. She bites her tongue and listens anxiously in on him through her com, heart racing at every pulse of static.

 

She tries not to be cool when they return to the base, tries to show him how glad she is that he has taken Coulson’s invitation to hang around—but his discrepancies in the field are stuck stubbornly in the forefront of her mind and even if he were not a weathered professional at reading her mood, it would be hard to miss the chill to her tone.

 

He tells her that he is sorry but she knows that he is lying.

 

“No more crazy hero moves, got it? You aren’t trained. You have to follow commands regardless.”

 

“Whatever you say.”

 

She is afraid that bringing him here, putting his impulsive protective nature in the field, might be one of the bigger mistakes she has made. It is too late to rectify it now.

 

She doesn’t want to lose him again.

 

She clears up the bunk next to her room and despite the raised brows around her, tells Lincoln it is where he is staying. That she is right next door and that if he needs anything, she is there. She wants to spend more time with him, wants to sit and play games and dedicate herself to his transition to the new place the same way that he dedicated himself to her—but she is sure Coulson is already growing impatient, waiting for her debrief.

 

She hesitates in his doorway anyway, watching him move to sit quietly on the edge of the bed in the otherwise empty room, setting his backpack down beside him and looking more lost than she has ever seen him.

 

Her heart gives a little, and after a stretching moment he glances up and sees her still watching him.

 

He smiles softly, and it is the first hint of the version of him she knew in the Afterlife that she has seen in a long while.

 

“I’ll be alright, Daisy. You don’t have to worry about me.”

 

She does.

 

//

 

He sticks close to her side as the days tick on and she begins to breath easily again. He is brighter, there is less weight on his shoulders holding him down.

 

He looks at her in that way no one has really looked at her, not before him. The mix of awe and soft, careful affection that doesn’t ask anything of her, doesn’t press for her to be any different from what she _is_. She likes that they have no expectations, no goals to meet. She likes that things are easy between them.

 

They aren’t back in the Afterlife but the warm feeling of home she attributed to it has found a way back to her.

 

“Will it happen again?”

 

She hopes so.


	2. Lincoln

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As requested, canon-compliant how Lincoln fell in love with Daisy.

It is inconvenient. He doesn’t resent it, he never does – the Afterlife is as important to him as his own home might be. But he is just short months from graduation and being needed as a mentor now, of all times, is as bad a time as it comes.

 

She is beautiful, and that is inconvenient, too.

 

But he is her mentor and it is his job to be her friend and her guide, and it is all so inconvenient – but he is happy to do it. Happy to be there for her, to do what he can to bring a smile to her perpetually tense expression, to help her find an ease he knows she hasn’t felt in a while.

 

He stumbles past words he doesn’t even remember saying and busies himself with vitals that it isn’t even his job to check.

 

She is different, though. She is hardheaded and angry and she consistently says and does things that tell him she doesn’t have time for herself. She has to find her friends, has to save the world – she doesn’t have room for this, doesn’t have time for making herself well. For being the one who needs a helping hand. He is gentle, reminding her that it is okay to take a breath, okay to let someone help her for a moment.

 

He understands her, but he tries not to let it show.

 

She is self-aware but brushes it aside, buries it somewhere inside of her behind walls that he doesn’t even know exist, not when at first glance she is all dry humor and warm eyes poised on a gentle smile.

 

But her smile is closed off, he realizes quickly – and so is she.

 

He knows better than most what it looks like to hide within yourself.

 

He tries to live by logic and careful choices, tries not to fall back on his generally misguided impulse – he can’t risk impulse, can’t risk setting of a spark that blows his fragile fuse. His impulse tells him she is someone special, someone unlike anyone he has met before. He buries his impulse behind his own walls.

 

It doesn’t stop him from taking her hand, from tangling his fingers across her soft palm, and from guiding the sparks that bloom beneath his fingertips dancing softly through her own. It isn’t the first time he has shown someone his power but it is the first time he does it specifically like this. He is acutely aware of the way tangled words and odd displays are falling awkwardly around him, but he feels his powers tingle from his pulsing veins to hers – and somehow feels an unexplainable returning tingle himself when her expression lights into a smile. A wide smile, eyes echoing the warmth– walls lifting, if only a crack. Recognition, connection – acceptance.

 

He thinks he might be the first person she has met who understands what she is struggling through.

 

Her protective walls slam firmly back down on him hours later, and there is an edge to her eyes, a sharpness that makes him wonder if she could understand him, too.

 

It is easy to fall in step with her odd but familiar offbeat tempo. Easy to laugh at her awful jokes and easy to return her soft smiles – she needs a friend and he is glad to be one, glad to have her around. She is faking, mostly – pretending she is okay, pretending she is over the fact that Raina is there and then pretending she isn’t shaken to the core after learning the truth about Jiaying (which he is still shocked she’s told _him_ about). But he lets her pretend, lets her tell them both she is okay – while making sure he does everything in his power to make it as okay as it gets. She forgets to eat so he makes it his job to remember. She gets tangled in her thoughts so he finds ways to make sure she doesn’t wander too deeply into them.

 

She smiles at the little things but she doesn’t know that it is good for both of them, that it keeps them both at their best.

 

Part of him wishes she would stay in the Afterlife, that after a few more weeks of coming to terms with her new self she would decide not to go back to the life her old self made. But he knows she would never stay. It is a part of why he admires her so much, why they connect so deeply.

 

His head throbs and he is only vaguely aware of her hands on his arm, of her eyes searching him with concern, of static pulsing between them as she moves herself in front of him, placing herself between him and her father. He comes back to himself slowly moving closer to her against all reason when the building begins to quiver.

 

Her emotions are too far out of check, her powers still too new – but when he first tells her so, first pleads with her to go, her stubborn streak, the streak that puts the world before herself – locks her feet firmly into place.

 

Instinct makes him shove her out of the way when bullets fire loudly in their direction, and the particularly violent shake her powers shove out as a response makes them both lose their footing, stumbling into a pile of limbs and heavy breathing and static that he loses control of for the first time in years.

 

His breath is momentarily knocked out of him by the force of the fall, by her body pressed firmly to his – by her fingers pressing into his shoulders, her hair curtaining around her cheeks, her eyes wide and shocked and, for a moment he might imagine, drifting nearer to him.

 

He breaks the spell with a final breathy plea for her to run, and this time it takes them both enough off guard to work.

 

It is a long moment before he can make his own limbs work again.

 

He feels like a caged animal and all his instincts tell him that he is in terrible danger, but he is only worried about her. Worried about whether or not she actually made it out, worried if he gave her enough time. There isn’t much else to think about, not really – and he lets himself sink into himself, into the impulsive, tightly strung part of him that has no trouble drawing a straight line from everything awful that happens right back to him.

 

When he opens his eyes and she is the first thing he sees, it is easy to be himself again. Easy to laugh at her shitty joke.

 

But they are at S.H.I.E.L.D. and then he resents it. Resents her trustfulness, resents his own.

 

He worries he will fall back in on himself, worries about the feelings he is beginning to associate with her, the connection he is creating, the emotions that she will never be able to return and never should _have to_.

 

He tries to separate himself, tries to put distance between them.

 

And then the Afterlife is gone, everything he has built around it shattered.

 

He has no _place_ , not anymore.

 

He finishes school and is lost.

 

She visits him, again and again – but he has promised himself he won’t go back to any of it. Promises himself that no matter how she pleads, how she reasons – he won’t risk losing his entire world again. He isn’t like her, isn’t strong enough to rebuild himself from the ground again and again.

 

He knows she sees the change in him. He feels her eyes linger on his wrinkled clothes after he has turned from her, sees her take in the piles of dishes left uncleaned in the sink, and the blinds pulled tight to the sun. He feels her concern, feels her need to care for him and he tries to resent it, tries to make it all the more reason to push her away.

 

He keeps telling her no because he knows every time she comes back, there is at least one person who still believes in him – however misguided that belief might be. He isn’t sure that he wants her to believe in him, he thinks that maybe he’d prefer if she gave up on him, too.

 

The hope in her eyes, the quiet expectance to see the him that fell apart with the Afterlife only makes him resent himself more.

 

He tells her that they are monsters and he thinks that it might be his lowest, thinks that he might finally have torn down her unshakeable faith in him. Thinks he might have broken her and despises himself for it the moment his heart has stopped thudding too loudly for him to hear his own thoughts.

 

Still, she is the person he blindly reaches for after he proves to be exactly the monster he once assured her that they weren’t.

 

Asking for help is as hard for him as it once was for her.

 

There is no resentment in her voice when she talks him carefully down, tells him where she can find him. Tells him she will help.

 

Everything is dark but the soft authority of her voice gives him something steady to cling onto, a part of the life he has lost.

 

He doesn’t deserve her.

 

He is still thinking it when she steps into the room he has hidden away in, when she tells him with that same soft confidence, that same unshaken faith that he isn’t everything he has become.

 

Pleads.

 

It is the first time he sees the way he feels mirrored in her expression, reflected in the wide eyes begging him to see himself as they do. Unaware that he never possibly could.

 

She is so much better than he is, but he refuses to say anything that might hurt her again. Refuses to let the darkness turn him into that. He lets her speak.

 

He tells her she is wasting her time because it is his last resort, the last thing he can think of to force space between them.

 

She kisses him anyway.

 

It is a taste of the easiness that they had back before the Afterlife crumbled, a reminder of the comfort and safety and _understanding_.

 

She is the last reminder of who he is when the darkness isn’t seeping through the cracks in his exterior. It is a reminder that he needs.

 

He hears the surprise in her voice the first time he calls her, pressing the numbers he has committed to memory into the cheap plastic phone he has been turning over in his palm all day long – wishing for that steady tone of hers. He doesn’t think about the time – not until the grogginess in her words registers and he suddenly takes note of the darkness around him. She tells him she doesn’t mind, and he knows her, knows that she _means_ it.

 

She asks him to keep calling, no matter what time it is.

 

He takes her words about his purpose to heart. About helping people. He finds some footing, some steadiness of his own – he tries to locate as many Inhuman’s as he can.

 

But someone else keeps finding them first.

 

He calls Mack because he doesn’t want to put her in any more unnecessary danger, even if he has no question of her ability to handle it.

 

When they bring him back to the base, when Coulson tiredly extends him one final offer to stay – he looks at her, loos at the reminder of what he is and what he does – and this time, he takes it.

 

He doesn’t realize he is agreeing to work with them, but he falls into the new place, the new purpose – with ease. He likes seeing Daisy in her depth, admires her resilience and never-ending talents more than ever before.

 

Enamored, he thinks only a little regretfully, is how he’d describe it.

 

It is so very in her nature when Mack proclaims he is staying behind as the building quivers – and she joins him, unfolding. Their little world is crumbling around them but this time he is the one out of his depth, he is the one with no grounds to stand on. He meets the familiar pleading in her eyes with a word or two of argument stuck on the edge of his tongue but his lips freeze.

 

Saving people is what she _does_ and his feeble words have no place against it. It is her place, her thing, her purpose – helping people, just as she encouraged him to return to when he had nothing else in the entire world.

 

It is why they work and he thinks why they might just be destined to fall perpetually apart—two same-sides of a magnet, stuck in a constant push and pull with no middle ground to be found.

 

He follows the others out even though breaking her gaze feels equivalent to tearing his heart from his chest. He likes her more than he should, has fallen further than he ever intended to let himself.

 

He also knows she can handle whatever is thrown at her.

 

It doesn’t stop his heart from thudding frantically at his chest as he watches the castle implode, doesn’t soften the bladed ice that shoots hopefully through his veins when the little white shuttle soars triumphantly from the rubble.

 

Fresh blood oozes from her nose but otherwise she is in one piece – or pretending to be more or less so. There is something in the way she smiles at him that makes him smile too – regardless of whatever concern he feels. Her hands fumble to cling to him as she nears, a movement lost somewhere between affection and need for support that makes his stomach flip nonetheless.

 

He shouldn’t kiss her – not now, not in front of the entire team. He distracts himself by steading her with a hand to her waist, by thumbing away the blood on her face, by reading softly into the weariness behind her otherwise bright smile and debating whether or not he should ask exactly what had happened.

 

He remember back before his first mission, remembers her claim that “knowing” if there’d be a second kiss took away the fun.

 

He thinks about just how unsure he was that he would ever get the chance again.

 

He shouldn’t. But he kisses her anyway.


End file.
